2002-2006. Designed with Dino Sanchez. Originally self-released; Reissued by House Industries in 2006.

Once a conceptual art project that commented on the high price of a certain aesthetic, the Luxury Collection is now available to the general public through House Industries. It has been celebrated as a brilliant joke and maligned as self-indulgence. A friend pointed us to a thread on a type blog where someone with a limited sense of humor (or maybe someone trying to be even more tongue-in-cheek than we were) said, "...they are very full of themselves. I bet they go belly up pretty soon. In these economic times no client will pony-up that kind of money." Wink wink, nudge nudge? In any case, we're interested to see what will happen once this previously rarified look is put in the hands of anyone who wants to use it.

In the four years since we first finished the three display faces, we had second thoughts about many of our design decisions, so the set has been extensively reworked and refined. Gold, Diamond and Platinum have also been expanded to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by OpenType.

We also decided to add a text face, loosely inspired by Aldo Novarese's interpretation of Roman inscriptional caps in the 1950s, which brought out the sharpness of the stonecutting in a way we really liked. After seeing some truly bizarre uses of Farnham's swashes in all caps, I wanted to draw a set of swash caps that are intended to be used this way. Thanks to brilliant feature programming by Tal Leming, the swashes intelligently distribute themselves to where they look best. The Bold, inspired by lettering I saw on a bronze plaque in Prague, is only causally related to the Roman, but I think it works. After spending a lot of time drawing text faces for newspapers, it was refreshing to draw something pretty for a change. Although we call it a text face, Luxury Text holds its own at display sizes, where the breezy Roman qualities really become obvious.